Malifax

An ancient skinless, skeletal lich-smith who lives and forges in a workshop deep in the under-prison beneath the Grey Vale Cave. Only bone now, with no flesh and eyes glowing orange with the embers of his forge (the party reckons his hammer is his phylactery), he hammers endlessly at half-finished blades, armed and armoured in his own smithed gear, and styles himself Forge Lord — having "ascended" from the Forge Master who held the place before him. His maker's mark is found across the prison: on the cell doors, the locks and keys, and the great sump-lid drainage covers.

He is no original jailer. Some 400,000 years ago he was one of a band of raiders who sieged this place for "Old-World tech," stripped its ancient pipes of every valuable metal (replacing them with "garbage pipes, out of politeness") — and drank the immortality elixir they found. The elixir, it turned out, had an expiration date they were 400,000 years too late for: it kept him from dying but not from rotting, so he persists as living bone. He can still be killed, but won't die of age, "so long as you stay safe in the beauty of your own workshop." He later forged the prison's cells, locks and keys for the lizard-people (at the request of Morgor, the eight-greats-grandfather of Grank) and built the tool that puts prisoners to sleep for moving.

Vain, eccentric, and lonely — estranged from the other immortal raiders, a clique ("Malifax and the others") who "never hang out with me" — he is nonetheless a delighted friend and ally to anyone who arrives with a key and a fellow craftsman's respect. He keeps a caged wanderer, Keith, who broke in two months ago.

(Name rendered "Malifax," "Malifax," and "Malifax," and his title slides Forge Master → Forge Lord; spellings best-guess. He is almost certainly of, or made by, the same Elder race whose elixir he drank.)

Session 27 (debut)

• His workshop is opened by the scrap-tub key Lash found; lowering his hammer at the sight of her smith's tools, he welcomes the party as "explorers, not thieves." Had they lacked a blacksmith and a key, he muses, this would have been "a really interesting boss fight."
• Upgrades Lash's auricalcum hammer: awed by it (he offers to trade his whole workshop), he does two days' work in an hour — advancing it to 20/21 days, fitting the spiked edge, and adding a "clang" rider — then insists Lash finish the final day herself.
• Crafts Thalia the Handtiders — hand-hiding gloves to foil the hand-stealing Queen — very nearly reinventing the glove from scratch in the process.
• Confirms he made the prisoner-moving / sleep tool (kept in a cupboard "past the bugs") and agrees to dig a giant new cell (~50×30 ft, ~4 months, using the freed digging golem) so the Queen can be put to sleep and re-caged. Reveals his four rooms — workshop, pipe room, bug room, "other room" — and that the other immortal raiders still lurk in the deep.
• Pushes his caged prisoner Keith out with a borrowed sword to help clear the bugs as the session ends.

Session 28

• Host and tour guide. After the bugs fall, he leads the party the long "safe way" to his cupboard to fetch the Prisoner-Moving Staff — detouring to greet his old friend the Ghoul Tamer (a 30%-flesh undead who breeds caged ghouls), threading past the Watchers, and fretting "Keith, did you shut the door?" at every threshold.
• Names a quest-giver — the "Wam." Describes a one-of-a-kind craftsman who "wams" two identical items into one greater item; his masterpiece twin swords are finished but for this. Bring the Wam here, he promises, and the party may have his prized hand mirror.
• Opens his treasury. Unlocks the cupboard with the key dangling inside his ribcage and lets the party paw through millennia of hoarded oddities (the random loot chest, the past-showing mirror, a pulsing egg-crystal, an unrememberable forget-object, his twin swords) — guarding all of it jealously.
• Gifts the meteorite — for a funeral. Lets the party take the meteorite that crushed three of his old companions, on the sole condition that the dead be tended by a professional; Valmora obliges, and he provides 25 gold of powdered silver for her Ceremony.
• Gives Silph-god lore. Recognises one of Valmora's dead-god amulets as the god of restraint / the Sylphites and returns it to her; feeds Silithane steak and wine for the novelty and accepts a memory-coin of the meal as payment "worth my friendship."
• Reveals he bleached himself. His bones were a colour he disliked, so he whitened them — unlike the Ghoul Tamer (who keeps his skin) and his estranged clique (also bleached). Confirms his immortal kind can still be killed, just not age.
• Proposes evicting his clique. Rather than dig a new cell, he suggests killing the "garbage skeletal cucks" ("Malifax and the others") in the other room — six beds, a kitchen, a wide door — and converting it into the Queen Grabbler's cell.
• Lets the party return via the golem-carved shortcut (which he slowly realises he commissioned), sets the staff on his anvil to borrow, and giddily offers his workshop for Lash to finish her hammer over a long rest.

Session 29

• Supplies the ruse. Buys six ghouls from the Ghoul Tamer to ship to his hated clique, and lends Valmora a truth serum (Zone of Truth) when Keith cries "heist." Plays the wounded would-be victim through the whole interrogation, then floats Keith back to custody "with my fallen ancestors."
• Confirms he forged the council table. Reveals his maker's mark on it; it was meant to keep his band of thieves "thick as thieves" honoring their word, and is why the party is now bound by the votes they cast.
• Rid of his clique at last — without a fight. Delighted the party dismantled the council for him ("you guys hadn't knocked on that door, I'd have been stuck there arguing with those idiots forever"), he seethes at the departing Cheve but won't attack — he's a thief who hires killers, and the two have never once fought in millennia.
• Smashes the cell open. Uses the Prisoner-Moving Staff to lift the binding table (on Jex's idea — earning a delighted forehead kiss) and to knock down the room's walls and door, widening the "other room" into the Queen Grabbler's future cell; agrees to hold the table for the party.
• A rare melancholy beat: with Cheve gone he can't bring himself to mock "Cheese" any more — "Doesn't feel the same to make fun of someone that's not here anymore."

Session 30

• Building the Queen's cell from the cleared council room — about two days' work (cut to ~1.5–2 by Magra and others pitching in), forging hefty portcullis-gates even without a glowing white-magic door of his own.
• Two gates needed. Advises the party the cell will need two functioning gates (one corner can be wriggled behind), and offers to transplant a still-working glowing gate from any prisoner they choose to release.
• Lends war-gear, but guards his cupboard. Agrees to dig out sharp/magic arrows, poisons, or a paralytic from his hoard for the Queen fight at Jex's asking — but won't reopen the cupboard to anyone after people left runes and a bird in it last time ("you violated the safe space of my cupboard"); he'll fetch named items himself.
• Offers the golem. Willing to send his enslaved digging golem into the battle, leaving the party the moral question of risking a creature that has only ever been a slave — and which he could free at any time but never has.

Session 31

• Joined the Queen fight in person, going toe-to-toe with a Grabbler while Keith (on a leash) and his six ghouls harried the drones — "aura farming," slow-walking out feeling super cool.
• Caged Caressa at last. Once the Queen surrendered, he wrapped her in the Prisoner-Moving Staff's white binding strings (she's far heavier than Keith — he lifted her barely three inches off the floor), floated her into the new cell, set the door, and lit the warding glyph — the campaign-long plan finally shut. Silithane followed to confirm she was properly locked up.
• Freed Keith. With his "one more fight" finally paid, Malifax unleashed Keith to leave the cave alive — "Run, Keith, run before they get you!"
• Shrugged off his Turn-Undead-incinerated ghouls as having "died from completely normal reasons," then joined the post-fight gathering, musing he "won't be a denizen of this cavern much longer."